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Fragment ebooka The Tragic Muse - Henry James

Henry James, son of theologian Henry James Sr. and brother of
the philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice
James, was an American-born author and literary critic of the late
19th and early 20th centuries. He spent much of his life in Europe
and became a British subject shortly before his death. He is
primarily known for novels, novellas and short stories based on
themes of consciousness and morality. James significantly
contributed to the criticism of fiction, particularly in his
insistence that writers be allowed the greatest freedom possible in
presenting their view of the world. His imaginative use of point of
view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his
own novels and tales brought a new depth and interest to narrative
fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, he published
substantive books of travel writing, biography, autobiography and
visual arts criticism. Source: Wikipedia

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Preface

I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the
origin and growth of The Tragic Muse, which appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly again, beginning January 1889 and running on,
inordinately, several months beyond its proper twelve. If it be
ever of interest and profit to put one's finger on the productive
germ of a work of art, and if in fact a lucid account of any such
work involves that prime identification, I can but look on the
present fiction as a poor fatherless and motherless, a sort of
unregistered and unacknowledged birth. I fail to recover my
precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to which it was
to give form; to recognise in it—as I like to do in general—the
effect of some particular sharp impression or concussion. I call
such remembered glimmers always precious, because without them
comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and without
that vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded in
doing. What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had
from still further back, must in fact practically have always had,
the happy thought of some dramatic picture of the "artist-life" and
of the difficult terms on which it is at the best secured and
enjoyed, the general question of its having to be not altogether
easily paid for. To "do something about art"—art, that is, as a
human complication and a social stumbling-block—must have been for
me early a good deal of a nursed intention, the conflict between
art and "the world" striking me thus betimes as one of the
half-dozen great primary motives. I remember even having taken for
granted with this fond inveteracy that no one of these pregnant
themes was likely to prove under the test more full of matter. This
being the case, meanwhile, what would all experience have done but
enrich one's conviction?—since if, on the one hand, I had gained a
more and more intimate view of the nature of art and the conditions
therewith imposed, so the world was a conception that clearly
required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of
filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that
there was opposition—why there should be was another matter—and
that the opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had
doubtless occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question
of the essence and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself
to demand the light of experience; so that to the growth of
experience, truly, the treatment of the subject had yielded. It had
waited for that advantage.

Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the
form of an invitation from the gentle editor of the Atlantic, the
late Thomas Bailey Aldrich, to contribute to his pages a serial
that should run through the year. That friendly appeal becomes thus
the most definite statement I can make of the "genesis" of the
book; though from the moment of its reaching me everything else in
the matter seems to live again. What lives not least, to be quite
candid, is the fact that I was to see this production make a
virtual end, for the time, as by its sinister effect—though for
reasons still obscure to me—of the pleasant old custom of the
"running" of the novel. Not for many years was I to feel the
practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive. The influence of The
Tragic Muse was thus exactly other than what I had all earnestly
(if of course privately enough) invoked for it, and I remember well
the particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched
it in a great grey void from which no echo or message whatever
would come back. None, in the event, ever came, and as I now read
the book over I find the circumstance make, in its name, for a
special tenderness of charity; even for that finer consideration
hanging in the parental breast about the maimed or slighted, the
disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or unlikely child—with this
hapless small mortal thought of further as somehow "compromising."
I am thus able to take the thing as having quite wittingly and
undisturbedly existed for itself alone, and to liken it to some
aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been
loosed; or, better still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and
overfigured and polished, but of which the lid, never lifted, has
provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The
consistent, the sustained, preserved tone of The Tragic Muse, its
constant and doubtless rather fine-drawn truth to its particular
sought pitch and accent, are, critically speaking, its principal
merit—the inner harmony that I perhaps presumptuously permit myself
to compare to an unevaporated scent.

After which indeed I may well be summoned to say what I mean, in
such a business, by an appreciable "tone" and how I can justify my
claim to it—a demonstration that will await us later. Suffice it
just here that I find the latent historic clue in my hand again
with the easy recall of my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a
story about art. There was my subject this time—all mature with
having long waited, and with the blest dignity that my original
perception of its value was quite lost in the mists of youth. I
must long have carried in my head the notion of a young man who
should amid difficulty—the difficulties being the story—have
abandoned "public life" for the zealous pursuit of some supposedly
minor craft; just as, evidently, there had hovered before me some
possible picture (but all comic and ironic) of one of the most
salient London "social" passions, the unappeasable curiosity for
the things of the theatre; for every one of them, that is, except
the drama itself, and for the "personality" of the performer
(almost any performer quite sufficiently serving) in particular.
This latter, verily, had struck me as an aspect appealing mainly to
satiric treatment; the only adequate or effective treatment, I had
again and again felt, for most of the distinctively social aspects
of London: the general artlessly histrionised air of things caused
so many examples to spring from behind any hedge. What came up,
however, at once, for my own stretched canvas, was that it would
have to be ample, give me really space to turn round, and that a
single illustrative case might easily be meagre fare. The young man
who should "chuck" admired politics, and of course some other
admired object with them, would be all very well; but he wouldn't
be enough—therefore what should one say to some other young man who
would chuck something and somebody else, admired in their way
too?

There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the
things advantageously chuckable for art; the question is all but of
choosing them in the heap. Yet were I to represent a struggle—an
interesting one, indispensably—with the passions of the theatre (as
a profession, or at least as an absorption) I should have to place
the theatre in another light than the satiric. This, however, would
by good luck be perfectly possible too—without a sacrifice of
truth; and I should doubtless even be able to make my theatric case
as important as I might desire it. It seemed clear that I needed
big cases—small ones would practically give my central idea away;
and I make out now my still labouring under the illusion that the
case of the sacrifice for art can ever be, with truth, with taste,
with discretion involved, apparently and showily "big." I daresay
it glimmered upon me even then that the very sharpest difficulty of
the victim of the conflict I should seek to represent, and the very
highest interest of his predicament, dwell deep in the fact that
his repudiation of the great obvious, great moral or functional or
useful character, shall just have to consent to resemble a
surrender for absolutely nothing. Those characters are all large
and expansive, seated and established and endowed; whereas the most
charming truth about the preference for art is that to parade
abroad so thoroughly inward and so naturally embarrassed a matter
is to falsify and vulgarise it; that as a preference attended with
the honours of publicity it is indeed nowhere; that in fact, under
the rule of its sincerity, its only honours are those of
contradiction, concentration and a seemingly deplorable
indifference to everything but itself. Nothing can well figure as
less "big," in an honest thesis, than a marked instance of
somebody's willingness to pass mainly for an ass. Of these things I
must, I say, have been in strictness aware; what I perhaps failed
of was to note that if a certain romantic glamour (even that of
mere eccentricity or of a fine perversity) may be flung over the
act of exchange of a "career" for the esthetic life in general, the
prose and the modesty of the matter yet come in with any exhibition
of the particular branch of esthetics selected. Then it is that the
attitude of hero or heroine may look too much—for the romantic
effect—like a low crouching over proved trifles. Art indeed has in
our day taken on so many honours and emoluments that the
recognition of its importance is more than a custom, has become on
occasion almost a fury: the line is drawn—especially in the English
world—only at the importance of heeding what it may mean.

The more I turn my pieces over, at any rate, the more I now see
I must have found in them, and I remember how, once well in
presence of my three typical examples, my fear of too ample a
canvas quite dropped. The only question was that if I had marked my
political case, from so far back, for "a story by itself," and then
marked my theatrical case for another, the joining together of
these interests, originally seen as separate, might, all
disgracefully, betray the seam, show for mechanical and
superficial. A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a
mortal horror of two stories, two pictures, in one. The reason of
this was the clearest—my subject was immediately, under that
disadvantage, so cheated of its indispensable centre as to become
of no more use for expressing a main intention than a wheel without
a hub is of use for moving a cart. It was a fact, apparently, that
one had on occasion seen two pictures in one; were there not for
instance certain sublime Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless
Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss of authority
half-a-dozen actions separately taking place? Yes, that might be,
but there had surely been nevertheless a mighty pictorial fusion,
so that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all
mysteriously to its own. Of course the affair would be simple
enough if composition could be kept out of the question; yet by
what art or process, what bars and bolts, what unmuzzled dogs and
pointed guns, perform that feat? I had to know myself utterly inapt
for any such valour and recognise that, to make it possible, sundry
things should have begun for me much further back than I had felt
them even in their dawn. A picture without composition slights its
most precious chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at
all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and
safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed.
There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes
has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War,
have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their
queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically
mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such
things are "superior to art"; but we understand least of all what
that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine
explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us. There is
life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby
prevented from "counting," I delight in a deep-breathing economy
and an organic form. My business was accordingly to "go in" for
complete pictorial fusion, some such common interest between my two
first notions as would, in spite of their birth under quite
different stars, do them no violence at all.

I recall with this confirmed infatuation of retrospect that
through the mild perceptions I here glance at there struck for The
Tragic Muse the first hour of a season of no small subjective
felicity; lighted mainly, I seem to see, by a wide west window
that, high aloft, looked over near and far London sunsets, a
half-grey, half-flushed expanse of London life. The production of
the thing, which yet took a good many months, lives for me again
all contemporaneously in that full projection, upon my very table,
of the good fog-filtered Kensington mornings; which had a way
indeed of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are
merged to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an
hotel bedroom in Paris during the autumn of 1889, with the
Exposition du Centenaire about to end—and my long story, through
the usual difficulties, as well. The usual difficulties—and I
fairly cherish the record as some adventurer in another line may
hug the sense of his inveterate habit of just saving in time the
neck he ever undiscourageably risks—were those bequeathed as a
particular vice of the artistic spirit, against which vigilance had
been destined from the first to exert itself in vain, and the
effect of which was that again and again, perversely, incurably,
the centre of my structure would insist on placing itself not, so
to speak, in the middle. It mattered little that the reader with
the idea or the suspicion of a structural centre is the rarest of
friends and of critics—a bird, it would seem, as merely fabled as
the phoenix: the terminational terror was none the less certain to
break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an active
figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much
too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession
that in very few of my productions, to my eye, has the organic
centre succeeded in getting into proper position.

Time after time, then, has the precious waistband or girdle,
studded and buckled and placed for brave outward show, practically
worked itself, and in spite of desperate remonstrance, or in other
words essential counterplotting, to a point perilously near the
knees—perilously I mean for the freedom of these parts. In several
of my compositions this displacement has so succeeded, at the
crisis, in defying and resisting me, has appeared so fraught with
probable dishonour, that I still turn upon them, in spite of the
greater or less success of final dissimulation, a rueful and
wondering eye. These productions have in fact, if I may be so bold
about it, specious and spurious centres altogether, to make up for
the failure of the true. As to which in my list they are, however,
that is another business, not on any terms to be made known. Such
at least would seem my resolution so far as I have thus proceeded.
Of any attention ever arrested by the pages forming the object of
this reference that rigour of discrimination has wholly and
consistently failed, I gather, to constitute a part. In which fact
there is perhaps after all a rough justice—since the infirmity I
speak of, for example, has been always but the direct and immediate
fruit of a positive excess of foresight, the overdone desire to
provide for future need and lay up heavenly treasure against the
demands of my climax. If the art of the drama, as a great French
master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations, that
is true only to a less extent of the art of the novel, and true
exactly in the degree in which the art of the particular novel
comes near that of the drama. The first half of a fiction insists
ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half,
and I have in general given so much space to making the theatre
propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely unequal.
Thereby has arisen with grim regularity the question of artfully,
of consummately masking the fault and conferring on the false
quantity the brave appearance of the true.

But I am far from pretending that these desperations of
ingenuity have not—as through seeming most of the very essence of
the problem—their exasperated charm; so far from it that my
particular supreme predicament in the Paris hotel, after an undue
primary leakage of time, no doubt, over at the great river-spanning
museum of the Champ de Mars and the Trocadero, fairly takes on to
me now the tender grace of a day that is dead. Re-reading the last
chapters of The Tragic Muse I catch again the very odour of Paris,
which comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de la Paix—with which
my room itself, for that matter, seems impregnated—and which hangs
for reminiscence about the embarrassed effort to "finish," not
ignobly, within my already exceeded limits; an effort prolonged
each day to those late afternoon hours during which the tone of the
terrible city seemed to deepen about one to an effect strangely
composed at once of the auspicious and the fatal. The "plot" of
Paris thickened at such hours beyond any other plot in the world, I
think; but there one sat meanwhile with another, on one's hands,
absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of one's
conditions was thus that one should have really, should have finely
and (given one's scale) concisely treated one's subject, in spite
of there being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still
to treat. If I spoke just now, however, of the "exasperated" charm
of supreme difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic
representation so easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely
interesting to meet. To put all that is possible of one's idea into
a form and compass that will contain and express it only by
delicate adjustments and an exquisite chemistry, so that there will
at the end be neither a drop of one's liquor left nor a hair's
breadth of the rim of one's glass to spare—every artist will
remember how often that sort of necessity has carried with it its
particular inspiration. Therein lies the secret of the appeal, to
his mind, of the successfully foreshortened thing, where
representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had
occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has
for its attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of
figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination
may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral
of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that
the "thick," the false, the dissembling second half of the work
before me, associated throughout with the effort to weight my
dramatic values as heavily as might be, since they had to be so
few, presents that effort as at the very last a quite convulsive,
yet in its way highly agreeable, spasm. Of such mild prodigies is
the "history" of any specific creative effort composed!

But I have got too much out of the "old" Kensington light of
twenty years ago—a lingering oblique ray of which, to-day surely
quite extinct, played for a benediction over my canvas. From the
moment I made out, at my high-perched west window, my lucky title,
that is from the moment Miriam Rooth herself had given it me, so
this young woman had given me with it her own position in the book,
and so that in turn had given me my precious unity, to which no
more than Miriam was either Nick Dormer or Peter Sherringham to be
sacrificed. Much of the interest of the matter was immediately,
therefore, in working out the detail of that unity and—always
entrancing range of questions—the order, the reason, the relation,
of presented aspects. With three general aspects, that of Miriam's
case, that of Nick's and that of Sherringham's, there was work in
plenty cut out; since happy as it might be to say, "My several
actions beautifully become one," the point of the affair would be
in showing them beautifully become so—without which showing foul
failure hovered and pounced. Well, the pleasure of handling an
action (or, otherwise expressed, of a "story") is at the worst, for
a storyteller, immense, and the interest of such a question as for
example keeping Nick Dormer's story his and yet making it also and
all effectively in a large part Peter Sherringham's, of keeping
Sherringham's his and yet making it in its high degree his
kinsman's too, and Miriam Rooth's into the bargain; just as Miriam
Rooth's is by the same token quite operatively his and Nick's, and
just as that of each of the young men, by an equal logic, is very
contributively hers—the interest of such a question, I say, is ever
so considerably the interest of the system on which the whole thing
is done. I see to-day that it was but half a system to say, "Oh
Miriam, a case herself, is the link between the two other cases";
that device was to ask for as much help as it gave and to require a
good deal more application than it announced on the surface. The
sense of a system saves the painter from the baseness of the
arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason, but as payment for
that service the process insists on being kept impeccably the right
one.

These are intimate truths indeed, of which the charm mainly
comes out but on experiment and in practice; yet I like to have it
well before me here that, after all, The Tragic Muse makes it not
easy to say which of the situations concerned in it predominates
and rules. What has become in that imperfect order, accordingly, of
the famous centre of one's subject? It is surely not in Nick's
consciousness—since why, if it be, are we treated to such an
intolerable dose of Sherringham's? It can't be in Sherringham's—we
have for that altogether an excess of Nick's. How, on the other
hand, can it be in Miriam's, given that we have no direct
exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all inferentially
and inductively, seeing it only through a more or less bewildered
interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an
absolutely objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how—with such an
amount of exposed subjectivity all round her—can so dense a medium
be a centre? Such questions as those go straight—thanks to which
they are, I profess, delightful; going straight they are of the
sort that makes answers possible. Miriam is central then to
analysis, in spite of being objective; central in virtue of the
fact that the whole thing has visibly, from the first, to get
itself done in dramatic, or at least in scenic conditions—though
scenic conditions which are as near an approach to the dramatic as
the novel may permit itself and which have this in common with the
latter, that they move in the light of alternation. This imposes a
consistency other than that of the novel at its loosest, and, for
one's subject, a different view and a different placing of the
centre. The charm of the scenic consistency, the consistency of the
multiplication of aspects, that of making them amusingly various,
had haunted the author of The Tragic Muse from far back, and he was
in due course to yield to it all luxuriously, too luxuriously
perhaps, in The Awkward Age, as will doubtless with the extension
of these remarks be complacently shown.

To put himself at any rate as much as possible under the
protection of it had been ever his practice (he had notably done so
in The Princess Casamassima, so frankly panoramic and
processional); and in what case could this protection have had more
price than in the one before us? No character in a play (any play
not a mere monologue) has, for the right expression of the thing, a
usurping consciousness; the consciousness of others is exhibited
exactly in the same way as that of the "hero"; the prodigious
consciousness of Hamlet, the most capacious and most crowded, the
moral presence the most asserted, in the whole range of fiction,
only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the story, no
matter how occasional these may be. It is left, in other words, to
answer for itself equally with theirs: wherefore (by a parity of
reasoning if not of example) Miriam's might without inconsequence
be placed on the same footing; and all in spite of the fact that
the "moral presence" of each of the men most importantly concerned
with her—or with the second of whom she at least is importantly
concerned—is independently answered for. The idea of the book
being, as I have said, a picture of some of the personal
consequences of the art-appetite raised to intensity, swollen to
voracity, the heavy emphasis falls where the symbol of some of the
complications so begotten might be made (as I judged, heaven
forgive me!) most "amusing": amusing I mean in the best very modern
sense. I never "go behind" Miriam; only poor Sherringham goes, a
great deal, and Nick Dormer goes a little, and the author, while
they so waste wonderment, goes behind them: but none the less she
is as thoroughly symbolic, as functional, for illustration of the
idea, as either of them, while her image had seemed susceptible of
a livelier and "prettier" concretion. I had desired for her, I
remember, all manageable vividness—so ineluctable had it long
appeared to "do the actress," to touch the theatre, to meet that
connexion somehow or other, in any free plunge of the speculative
fork into the contemporary social salad.

The late R. L. Stevenson was to write to me, I recall—and
precisely on the occasion of The Tragic Muse—that he was at a loss
to conceive how one could find an interest in anything so vulgar or
pretend to gather fruit in so scrubby an orchard; but the view of a
creature of the stage, the view of the "histrionic temperament," as
suggestive much less, verily, in respect to the poor stage per se
than in respect to "art" at large, affected me in spite of that as
justly tenable. An objection of a more pointed order was forced
upon me by an acute friend later on and in another connexion: the
challenge of one's right, in any pretended show of social
realities, to attach to the image of a "public character," a
supposed particular celebrity, a range of interest, of intrinsic
distinction, greater than any such display of importance on the
part of eminent members of the class as we see them about us. There
was a nice point if one would—yet only nice enough, after all, to
be easily amusing. We shall deal with it later on, however, in a
more urgent connexion. What would have worried me much more had it
dawned earlier is the light lately thrown by that admirable writer
M. Anatole France on the question of any animated view of the
histrionic temperament—a light that may well dazzle to distress any
ingenuous worker in the same field. In those parts of his brief but
inimitable Histoire Comique on which he is most to be
congratulated—for there are some that prompt to reserves—he has
"done the actress," as well as the actor, done above all the
mountebank, the mummer and the cabotin, and mixed them up with the
queer theatric air, in a manner that practically warns all other
hands off the material for ever. At the same time I think I saw
Miriam, and without a sacrifice of truth, that is of the particular
glow of verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by, in a
complexity of relations finer than any that appear possible for the
gentry of M. Anatole France.

Her relation to Nick Dormer, for instance, was intended as a
superior interest—that of being (while perfectly sincere, sincere
for her, and therefore perfectly consonant with her impulse
perpetually to perform and with her success in performing) the
result of a touched imagination, a touched pride for "art," as well
as of the charm cast on other sensibilities still. Dormer's
relation to herself is a different matter, of which more presently;
but the sympathy she, poor young woman, very generously and
intelligently offers him where most people have so stinted it, is
disclosed largely at the cost of her egotism and her personal
pretensions, even though in fact determined by her sense of their
together, Nick and she, postponing the "world" to their conception
of other and finer decencies. Nick can't on the whole see—for I
have represented him as in his day quite sufficiently troubled and
anxious—why he should condemn to ugly feebleness his most prized
faculty (most prized, at least, by himself) even in order to keep
his seat in Parliament, to inherit Mr. Carteret's blessing and
money, to gratify his mother and carry out the mission of his
father, to marry Julia Dallow in fine, a beautiful imperative woman
with a great many thousands a year. It all comes back in the last
analysis to the individual vision of decency, the critical as well
as the passionate judgement of it under sharp stress; and Nick's
vision and judgement, all on the esthetic ground, have beautifully
coincided, to Miriam's imagination, with a now fully marked, an
inspired and impenitent, choice of her own: so that, other
considerations powerfully aiding indeed, she is ready to see their
interest all splendidly as one. She is in the uplifted state to
which sacrifices and submissions loom large, but loom so just
because they must write sympathy, write passion, large. Her measure
of what she would be capable of for him—capable, that is, of not
asking of him—will depend on what he shall ask of her, but she has
no fear of not being able to satisfy him, even to the point of
"chucking" for him, if need be, that artistic identity of her own
which she has begun to build up. It will all be to the glory,
therefore, of their common infatuation with "art": she will
doubtless be no less willing to serve his than she was eager to
serve her own, purged now of the too great shrillness.

This puts her quite on a different level from that of the vivid
monsters of M. France, whose artistic identity is the last thing
they wish to chuck—their only dismissal is of all material and
social over-draping. Nick Dormer in point of fact asks of Miriam
nothing but that she shall remain "awfully interesting to paint";
but that is his relation, which, as I say, is quite a matter by
itself. He at any rate, luckily for both of them it may be, doesn't
put her to the test: he is so busy with his own case, busy with
testing himself and feeling his reality. He has seen himself as
giving up precious things for an object, and that object has
somehow not been the young woman in question, nor anything very
nearly like her. She, on the other hand, has asked everything of
Peter Sherringham, who has asked everything of her; and it is in so
doing that she has really most testified for art and invited him to
testify. With his professed interest in the theatre—one of those
deep subjections that, in men of "taste," the Comédie Française
used in old days to conspire for and some such odd and affecting
examples of which were to be noted—he yet offers her his hand and
an introduction to the very best society if she will leave the
stage. The power—and her having the sense of the power—to "shine"
in the world is his highest measure of her, the test applied by him
to her beautiful human value; just as the manner in which she turns
on him is the application of her own standard and touchstone. She
is perfectly sure of her own; for—if there were nothing else, and
there is much—she has tasted blood, so to speak, in the form of her
so prompt and auspicious success with the public, leaving all
probations behind (the whole of which, as the book gives it, is too
rapid and sudden, though inevitably so: processes, periods,
intervals, stages, degrees, connexions, may be easily enough and
barely enough named, may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to
the deep discredit of the writer, but it remains the very deuce to
represent them, especially represent them under strong compression
and in brief and subordinate terms; and this even though the
novelist who doesn't represent, and represent "all the time," is
lost, exactly as much lost as the painter who, at his work and
given his intention, doesn't paint "all the time").

Turn upon her friend at any rate Miriam does; and one of my main
points is missed if it fails to appear that she does so with
absolute sincerity and with the cold passion of the high critic who
knows, on sight of them together, the more or less dazzling false
from the comparatively grey-coloured true. Sherringham's whole
profession has been that he rejoices in her as she is, and that the
theatre, the organised theatre, will be, as Matthew Arnold was in
those very days pronouncing it, irresistible; and it is the
promptness with which he sheds his pretended faith as soon as it
feels in the air the breath of reality, as soon as it asks of him a
proof or a sacrifice, it is this that excites her doubtless
sufficiently arrogant scorn. Where is the virtue of his high
interest if it has verily never been an interest to speak of and if
all it has suddenly to suggest is that, in face of a serious call,
it shall be unblushingly relinquished? If he and she together, and
her great field and future, and the whole cause they had armed and
declared for, have not been serious things they have been base
make-believes and trivialities—which is what in fact the homage of
society to art always turns out so soon as art presumes not to be
vulgar and futile. It is immensely the fashion and immensely
edifying to listen to, this homage, while it confines its attention
to vanities and frauds; but it knows only terror, feels only
horror, the moment that, instead of making all the concessions, art
proceeds to ask for a few. Miriam is nothing if not strenuous, and
evidently nothing if not "cheeky," where Sherringham is concerned
at least: these, in the all-egotistical exhibition to which she is
condemned, are the very elements of her figure and the very colours
of her portrait. But she is mild and inconsequent for Nick Dormer
(who demands of her so little); as if gravely and pityingly
embracing the truth that his sacrifice, on the right side, is
probably to have very little of her sort of recompense. I must have
had it well before me that she was all aware of the small strain a
great sacrifice to Nick would cost her—by reason of the strong
effect on her of his own superior logic, in which the very
intensity of concentration was so to find its account.

If the man, however, who holds her personally dear yet holds her
extremely personal message to the world cheap, so the man capable
of a consistency and, as she regards the matter, of an honesty so
much higher than Sherringham's, virtually cares, "really" cares, no
straw for his fellow-struggler. If Nick Dormer attracts and
all-indifferently holds her it is because, like herself and unlike
Peter, he puts "art" first; but the most he thus does for her in
the event is to let her see how she may enjoy, in intimacy, the
rigour it has taught him and which he cultivates at her expense.
This is the situation in which we leave her, though there would be
more still to be said about the difference for her of the two
relations—that to each of the men—could I fondly suppose as much of
the interest of the book "left over" for the reader as for myself.
Sherringham, for instance, offers Miriam marriage, ever so
"handsomely"; but if nothing might lead me on further than the
question of what it would have been open to us—us novelists,
especially in the old days—to show, "serially," a young man in Nick
Dormer's quite different position as offering or a young woman in
Miriam's as taking, so for that very reason such an excursion is
forbidden me. The trade of the stage-player, and above all of the
actress, must have so many detestable sides for the person
exercising it that we scarce imagine a full surrender to it without
a full surrender, not less, to every immediate compensation, to
every freedom and the largest ease within reach: which presentment
of the possible case for Miriam would yet have been condemned—and
on grounds both various and interesting to trace—to remain very
imperfect.

I feel, moreover, that I might still, with space, abound in
remarks about Nick's character and Nick's crisis suggested to my
present more reflective vision. It strikes me, alas, that he is not
quite so interesting as he was fondly intended to be, and this in
spite of the multiplication, within the picture, of his pains and
penalties; so that while I turn this slight anomaly over I come
upon a reason that affects me as singularly charming and touching
and at which indeed I have already glanced. Any presentation of the
artist in triumph must be flat in proportion as it really sticks to
its subject—it can only smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put
the matter in an image, all we then—in his triumph—see of the
charm-compeller is the back he turns to us as he bends over his
work. "His" triumph, decently, is but the triumph of what he
produces, and that is another affair. His romance is the romance he
himself projects; he eats the cake of the very rarest privilege,
the most luscious baked in the oven of the gods—therefore he mayn't
"have" it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same
time. The privilege of the hero—that is, of the martyr or of the
interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering
person—places him in quite a different category, belongs to him
only as to the artist deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished;
when the "amateur" in him gains, for our admiration or compassion
or whatever, all that the expert has to do without. Therefore I
strove in vain, I feel, to embroil and adorn this young man on whom
a hundred ingenious touches are thus lavished: he has insisted in
the event on looking as simple and flat as some mere brass check or
engraved number, the symbol and guarantee of a stored treasure. The
better part of him is locked too much away from us, and the part we
see has to pass for—well, what it passes for, so lamentedly, among
his friends and relatives. No, accordingly, Nick Dormer isn't "the
best thing in the book," as I judge I imagined he would be, and it
contains nothing better, I make out, than that preserved and
achieved unity and quality of tone, a value in itself, which I
referred to at the beginning of these remarks. What I mean by this
is that the interest created, and the expression of that interest,
are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves. The
appeal, the fidelity to the prime motive, is, with no little art,
strained clear (even as silver is polished) in a degree
answering—at least by intention—to the air of beauty. There is an
awkwardness again in having thus belatedly to point such features
out; but in that wrought appearance of animation and harmony, that
effect of free movement and yet of recurrent and insistent
reference, The Tragic Muse has struck me again as conscious of a
bright advantage.

HENRY JAMES.

Chapter1

The people of France have made it no secret that those of
England, as a general thing, are to their perception an
inexpressive and speechless race, perpendicular and unsociable,
unaddicted to enriching any bareness of contact with verbal or
other embroidery. This view might have derived encouragement, a few
years ago, in Paris, from the manner in which four persons sat
together in silence, one fine day about noon, in the garden, as it
is called, of the Palais de l'Industrie—the central court of the
great glazed bazaar where, among plants and parterres, gravelled
walks and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and groups, the
monuments and busts, which form in the annual exhibition of the
Salon the department of statuary. The spirit of observation is
naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or
artless appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to
take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on
definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful
plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have
marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood,
representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on
the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a
holiday—Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn—Paris
besprinkles itself at a night's notice. They had about them the
indefinable professional look of the British traveller abroad; the
air of preparation for exposure, material and moral, which is so
oddly combined with the serene revelation of security and of
persistence, and which excites, according to individual
susceptibility, the ire or the admiration of foreign communities.
They were the more unmistakable as they presented mainly the
happier aspects of the energetic race to which they had the honour
to belong. The fresh diffused light of the Salon made them clear
and important; they were finished creations, in their way, and,
ranged there motionless on their green bench, were almost as much
on exhibition as if they had been hung on the line.

Three ladies and a young man, they were obviously a family—a
mother, two daughters and a son; a circumstance which had the
effect at once of making each member of the group doubly typical
and of helping to account for their fine taciturnity. They were
not, with each other, on terms of ceremony, and also were probably
fatigued with their course among the pictures, the rooms on the
upper floor. Their attitude, on the part of visitors who had
superior features even if they might appear to some passers-by to
have neglected a fine opportunity for completing these features
with an expression, was after all a kind of tribute to the state of
exhaustion, of bewilderment, to which the genius of France is still
capable of reducing the proud.

"En v'la des abrutis!" more than one of their fellow-gazers
might have been heard to exclaim; and certain it is that there was
something depressed and discouraged in this interesting group, who
sat looking vaguely before them, not noticing the life of the
place, somewhat as if each had a private anxiety. It might have
been finely guessed, however, that though on many questions they
were closely united this present anxiety was not the same for each.
If they looked grave, moreover, this was doubtless partly the
result of their all being dressed in such mourning as told of a
recent bereavement. The eldest of the three ladies had indeed a
face of a fine austere mould which would have been moved to gaiety
only by some force more insidious than any she was likely to
recognise in Paris. Cold, still, and considerably worn, it was
neither stupid nor hard—it was firm, narrow and sharp. This
competent matron, acquainted evidently with grief but not weakened
by it, had a high forehead to which the quality of the skin gave a
singular polish—it glittered even when seen at a distance; a nose
which achieved a high free curve; and a tendency to throw back her
head and carry it well above her, as if to disengage it from the
possible entanglements of the rest of her person. If you had seen
her walk you would have felt her to tread the earth after a fashion
suggesting that in a world where she had long since discovered that
one couldn't have one's own way one could never tell what annoying
aggression might take place, so that it was well, from hour to
hour, to save what one could. Lady Agnes saved her head, her white
triangular forehead, over which her close-crinkled flaxen hair,
reproduced in different shades in her children, made a looped
silken canopy like the marquee at a garden-party. Her daughters
were as tall as herself—that was visible even as they sat there—and
one of them, the younger evidently, altogether pretty; a straight,
slender, grey-eyed English girl of the sort who show "good" figures
and fresh complexions. The sister, who was not pretty, was also
straight and slender and grey-eyed. But the grey in this case was
not so pure, nor were the straightness and the slenderness so
maidenly. The brother of these young ladies had taken off his hat
as if he felt the air of the summer day heavy in the great
pavilion. He was a lean, strong, clear-faced youth, with a formed
nose and thick light-brown hair which lay continuously and
profusely back from his forehead, so that to smooth it from the
brow to the neck but a single movement of the hand was required. I
cannot describe him better than by saying that he was the sort of
young Englishman who looks particularly well in strange lands and
whose general aspect—his inches, his limbs, his friendly eyes, the
modulation of his voice, the cleanness of his flesh-tints and the
fashion of his garments—excites on the part of those who encounter
him in far countries on the ground of a common speech a delightful
sympathy of race. This sympathy may sometimes be qualified by the
seen limits of his apprehension, but it almost revels as such
horizons recede. We shall see quickly enough how accurate a measure
it might have taken of Nicholas Dormer. There was food for
suspicion perhaps in the wandering blankness that sat at moments in
his eyes, as if he had no attention at all, not the least in the
world, at his command; but it is no more than just to add without
delay that this discouraging symptom was known among those who
liked him by the indulgent name of dreaminess. By his mother and
sisters, for instance, his dreaminess was constantly noted. He is
the more welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there
is always held to be something engaging in the combination of the
muscular and the musing, the mildness of strength.

After some time, an interval during which these good people
might have appeared to have come, individually, to the Palais de
l'Industrie much less to see the works of art than to think over
their domestic affairs, the young man, rousing himself from his
reverie, addressed one of the girls.

"I say, Biddy, why should we sit moping here all day? Come and
take a turn about with me."

His younger sister, while he got up, leaned forward a little,
looking round her, but she gave for the moment no further sign of
complying with his invitation.

"Where shall we find you, then, if Peter comes?" asked the other
Miss Dormer, making no movement at all.

"I daresay Peter won't come. He'll leave us here to cool our
heels."

"Oh Nick dear!" Biddy exclaimed in a small sweet voice of
protest. It was plainly her theory that Peter would come, and even
a little her fond fear that she might miss him should she quit that
spot.

"We shall come back in a quarter of an hour. Really I must look
at these things," Nick declared, turning his face to a marble group
which stood near them on the right—a man with the skin of a beast
round his loins, tussling with a naked woman in some primitive
effort of courtship or capture.

Lady Agnes followed the direction of her son's eyes and then
observed: "Everything seems very dreadful. I should think Biddy had
better sit still. Hasn't she seen enough horrors up above?"

"I daresay that if Peter comes Julia'll be with him," the elder
girl remarked irrelevantly.

"Well then he can take Julia about. That will be more proper,"
said Lady Agnes.

"I think she has awfully good taste!" Grace exclaimed, not
answering this inquiry.

"Don't say nasty things about her!" Lady Agnes broke out
solemnly to her son after resting her eyes on him a moment with an
air of reluctant reprobation.

"I say nothing but what she'd say herself," the young man urged.
"About some things she has very good taste, but about this kind of
thing she has no taste at all."

"That's better, I think," said Lady Agnes, turning her eyes
again to the "kind of thing" her son appeared to designate.

"She's awfully clever—awfully!" Grace went on with decision.

"Awfully, awfully!" her brother repeated, standing in front of
her and smiling down at her.

"You are nasty, Nick. You know you are," said the young lady,
but more in sorrow than in anger.

Biddy got up at this, as if the accusatory tone prompted her to
place herself generously at his side. "Mightn't you go and order
lunch—in that place, you know?" she asked of her mother. "Then we'd
come back when it was ready."

"My dear child, I can't order lunch," Lady Agnes replied with a
cold impatience which seemed to intimate that she had problems far
more important than those of victualling to contend with.

"Then perhaps Peter will if he comes. I'm sure he's up in
everything of that sort."

"Oh hang Peter!" Nick exclaimed. "Leave him out of account, and
do order lunch, mother; but not cold beef and pickles."

"I must say—about him—you're not nice," Biddy ventured to remark
to her brother, hesitating and even blushing a little.

"You make up for it, my dear," the young man answered, giving
her chin—a very charming, rotund, little chin—a friendly whisk with
his forefinger.

"I can't imagine what you've got against him," her ladyship said
gravely.

"Dear mother, it's disappointed fondness," Nick argued. "They
won't answer one's notes; they won't let one know where they are
nor what to expect. 'Hell has no fury like a woman scorned'; nor
like a man either."

"Peter has such a tremendous lot to do—it's a very busy time at
the embassy; there are sure to be reasons," Biddy explained with
her pretty eyes.

"Reasons enough, no doubt!" said Lady Agnes—who accompanied
these words with an ambiguous sigh, however, as if in Paris even
the best reasons would naturally be bad ones.

"Doesn't Julia write to you, doesn't she answer you the very
day?" Grace asked, looking at Nick as if she were the bold one.

He waited, returning her glance with a certain severity. "What
do you know about my correspondence? No doubt I ask too much," he
went on; "I'm so attached to them. Dear old Peter, dear old
Julia!"

"The beautiful objects of which she disposes so freely are the
things he collected for years laboriously, devotedly, poor
man!"

"She disposes of them to you, but not to others," said Lady
Agnes. "But that's all right," she added, as if this might have
been taken for a complaint of the limitations of Julia's bounty.
"She has to select among so many, and that's a proof of taste," her
ladyship pursued.

"You can't say she doesn't choose lovely ones," Grace remarked
to her brother in a tone of some triumph.

"My dear, they're all lovely. George Dallow's judgement was so
sure, he was incapable of making a mistake," Nicholas Dormer
returned.

"I don't see how you can talk of him, he was dreadful," said
Lady Agnes.

"My dear, if he was good enough for Julia to marry he's good
enough for us to talk of."

"She did him a very great honour."

"I daresay, but he was not unworthy of it. No such enlightened
collection of beautiful objects has been made in England in our
time."

"You think too much of beautiful objects!" Lady Agnes
sighed.

"I thought you were just now lamenting that I think too
little."

"It's very nice—his having left Julia so well off," Biddy
interposed soothingly, as if she foresaw a tangle.

"He treated her en grand seigneur, absolutely," Nick went
on.

"He used to look greasy, all the same"—Grace bore on it with a
dull weight. "His name ought to have been Tallow."

"You're not saying what Julia would like, if that's what you are
trying to say," her brother observed.

"Don't be vulgar, Grace," said Lady Agnes.

"I know Peter Sherringham's birthday!" Biddy broke out
innocently, as a pacific diversion. She had passed her hand into
Nick's arm, to signify her readiness to go with him, while she
scanned the remoter reaches of the garden as if it had occurred to
her that to direct their steps in some such sense might after all
be the shorter way to get at Peter.

"Come, Bid, we'll go and be vulgar together; for that's what we
are, I'm afraid," her brother said to her. "We'll go and look at
all these low works of art."

"Do you really think it's necessary to the child's development?"
Lady Agnes demanded as the pair turned away. And then while her
son, struck as by a challenge, paused, lingering a moment with his
little sister on his arm: "What we've been through this morning in
this place, and what you've paraded before our eyes—the murders,
the tortures, all kinds of disease and indecency!"

Nick looked at his mother as if this sudden protest surprised
him, but as if also there were lurking explanations of it which he
quickly guessed. Her resentment had the effect not so much of
animating her cold face as of making it colder, less expressive,
though visibly prouder. "Ah dear mother, don't do the British
matron!" he replied good-humouredly.

"British matron's soon said! I don't know what they're coming
to."

"How odd that you should have been struck only with the
disagreeable things when, for myself, I've felt it to be most
interesting, the most suggestive morning I've passed for ever so
many months!"

"Oh Nick, Nick!" Lady Agnes cried with a strange depth of
feeling.

"I like them better in London—they're much less unpleasant,"
said Grace Dormer.

"They're things you can look at," her ladyship went on. "We
certainly make the better show."

"The subject doesn't matter, it's the treatment, the treatment!"
Biddy protested in a voice like the tinkle of a silver bell.

"Poor little Bid!"—her brother broke into a laugh.

"How can I learn to model, mamma dear, if I don't look at things
and if I don't study them?" the girl continued.

This question passed unheeded, and Nicholas Dormer said to his
mother, more seriously, but with a certain kind explicitness, as if
he could make a particular allowance: "This place is an immense
stimulus to me; it refreshes me, excites me—it's such an exhibition
of artistic life. It's full of ideas, full of refinements; it gives
one such an impression of artistic experience. They try everything,
they feel everything. While you were looking at the murders,
apparently, I observed an immense deal of curious and interesting
work. There are too many of them, poor devils; so many who must
make their way, who must attract attention. Some of them can only
taper fort, stand on their heads, turn somersaults or commit deeds
of violence, to make people notice them. After that, no doubt, a
good many will be quieter. But I don't know; to-day I'm in an
appreciative mood—I feel indulgent even to them: they give me an
impression of intelligence, of eager observation. All art is
one—remember that, Biddy dear," the young man continued, smiling
down from his height. "It's the same great many-headed effort, and
any ground that's gained by an individual, any spark that's struck
in any province, is of use and of suggestion to all the others.
We're all in the same boat."

"'We,' do you say, my dear? Are you really setting up for an
artist?" Lady Agnes asked.

Nick just hesitated. "I was speaking for Biddy."

"But you are one, Nick—you are!" the girl cried.

Lady Agnes looked for an instant as if she were going to say
once more "Don't be vulgar!" But she suppressed these words, had
she intended them, and uttered sounds, few in number and not
completely articulate, to the effect that she hated talking about
art. While her son spoke she had watched him as if failing to
follow; yet something in the tone of her exclamation hinted that
she had understood him but too well.

"Ah but look at the results!" said the girl eagerly—glancing
about at the monuments in the garden as if in regard even to them
she were, through that unity of art her brother had just
proclaimed, in some degree an effective cause.

"There's a great deal being done here—a real vitality," Nicholas
Dormer went on to his mother in the same reasonable informing way.
"Some of these fellows go very far."

"They do indeed!" said Lady Agnes.

"I'm fond of young schools—like this movement in sculpture,"
Nick insisted with his slightly provoking serenity.

"They're old enough to know better!"

"Mayn't I look, mamma? It is necessary to my development," Biddy
declared.

"You may do as you like," said Lady Agnes with dignity.

"She ought to see good work, you know," the young man went
on.

"I leave it to your sense of responsibility." This statement was
somewhat majestic, and for a moment evidently it tempted Nick,
almost provoked him, or at any rate suggested to him an occasion
for some pronouncement he had had on his mind. Apparently, however,
he judged the time on the whole not quite right, and his sister
Grace interposed with the inquiry—

"Please, mamma, are we never going to lunch?"

"Ah mother, mother!" the young man murmured in a troubled way,
looking down at her with a deep fold in his forehead.

For Lady Agnes also, as she returned his look, it seemed an
occasion; but with this difference that she had no hesitation in
taking advantage of it. She was encouraged by his slight
embarrassment, for ordinarily Nick was not embarrassed. "You used
to have so much sense of responsibility," she pursued; "but
sometimes I don't know what has become of it—it seems all, all
gone!"

"Ah mother, mother!" he exclaimed again—as if there were so many
things to say that it was impossible to choose. But now he stepped
closer, bent over her and in spite of the publicity of their
situation gave her a quick expressive kiss. The foreign observer
whom I took for granted in beginning to sketch this scene would
have had to admit that the rigid English family had after all a
capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer indeed looked round her to see
if at this moment they were noticed. She judged with satisfaction
that they had escaped.

Chapter2

Nick Dormer walked away with Biddy, but he had not gone far
before he stopped in front of a clever bust, where his mother, in
the distance, saw him playing in the air with his hand, carrying
out by this gesture, which presumably was applausive, some critical
remark he had made to his sister. Lady Agnes raised her glass to
her eyes by the long handle to which rather a clanking chain was
attached, perceiving that the bust represented an ugly old man with
a bald head; at which her ladyship indefinitely sighed, though it
was not apparent in what way such an object could be detrimental to
her daughter. Nick passed on and quickly paused again; this time,
his mother discerned, before the marble image of a strange
grimacing woman. Presently she lost sight of him; he wandered
behind things, looking at them all round.

"I ought to get plenty of ideas for my modelling, oughtn't I,
Nick?" his sister put to him after a moment.

"Ah my poor child, what shall I say?"

"Don't you think I've any capacity for ideas?" the girl
continued ruefully.

"Lots of them, no doubt. But the capacity for applying them, for
putting them into practice—how much of that have you?"

"How can I tell till I try?"

"What do you mean by trying, Biddy dear?"

"Why you know—you've seen me."

"Do you call that trying?" her brother amusedly demanded.

"Ah Nick!" she said with sensibility. But then with more spirit:
"And please what do you call it?"

"Well, this for instance is a good case." And her companion
pointed to another bust—a head of a young man in terra-cotta, at
which they had just arrived; a modern young man to whom, with his
thick neck, his little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the
artist had given the air of some sturdy Florentine of the time of
Lorenzo.

Biddy looked at the image a moment. "Ah that's not trying;
that's succeeding."

"Not altogether; it's only trying seriously."

"Well, why shouldn't I be serious?"

"Mother wouldn't like it. She has inherited the fine old
superstition that art's pardonable only so long as it's bad—so long
as it's done at odd hours, for a little distraction, like a game of
tennis or of whist. The only thing that can justify it, the effort
to carry it as far as one can (which you can't do without time and
singleness of purpose), she regards as just the dangerous, the
criminal element. It's the oddest hind-part-before view, the
drollest immorality."

"She doesn't want one to be professional," Biddy returned as if
she could do justice to every system.

"Better leave it alone then. There are always duffers
enough."

"I don't want to be a duffer," Biddy said. "But I thought you
encouraged me."

Biddy for a while said nothing and they continued their tour of
observation. She noticed how he passed over some things quickly,
his first glance sufficing to show him if they were worth another,
and then recognised in a moment the figures that made some appeal.
His tone puzzled but his certainty of eye impressed her, and she
felt what a difference there was yet between them—how much longer
in every case she would have taken to discriminate. She was aware
of how little she could judge of the value of a thing till she had
looked at it ten minutes; indeed modest little Biddy was compelled
privately to add "And often not even then." She was mystified, as I
say—Nick was often mystifying, it was his only fault—but one thing
was definite: her brother had high ability. It was the
consciousness of this that made her bring out at last: "I don't so
much care whether or no I please mamma, if I please you."

"So that you intend to give up your work—to let it alone, as you
advise me?"

"It has never been my work, all that business, Biddy. If it had
it would be different. I should stick to it."

"And you won't stick to it?" the girl said, standing before him
open-eyed.

Her brother looked into her eyes a moment, and she had a
compunction; she feared she was indiscreet and was worrying him.
"Your questions are much simpler than the elements out of which my
answer should come."

"We shall see if your talent's real?" Biddy went on as she
accompanied him.

"No; we shall see if, as you say, I can't help it. What nonsense
Paris makes one talk!" the young man added as they stopped in front
of the composition. This was true perhaps, but not in a sense he
could find himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from his
first visit to the French capital: he had often quitted England and
usually made a point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days
there on the outward journey to the Continent or on the return; but
at present the feelings, for the most part agreeable, attendant
upon a change of air and of scene had been more punctual and more
acute than for a long time before, and stronger the sense of
novelty, refreshment, amusement, of the hundred appeals from that
quarter of thought to which on the whole his attention was apt most
frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was fonder of
Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps as
some other captivated aliens: the place had always had the virtue
of quickening in him sensibly the life of reflexion and
observation. It was a good while since his impressions had been so
favourable to the city by the Seine; a good while at all events
since they had ministered so to excitement, to exhilaration, to
ambition, even to a restlessness that was not prevented from being
agreeable by the excess of agitation in it. Nick could have given
the reason of this unwonted glow, but his preference was very much
to keep it to himself. Certainly to persons not deeply knowing, or
at any rate not deeply curious, in relation to the young man's
history the explanation might have seemed to beg the question,
consisting as it did of the simple formula that he had at last come
to a crisis. Why a crisis—what was it and why had he not come to it
before? The reader shall learn these things in time if he cares
enough for them.

Our young man had not in any recent year failed to see the
Salon, which the general voice this season pronounced not
particularly good. None the less it was the present exhibition
that, for some cause connected with his "crisis," made him think
fast, produced that effect he had spoken of to his mother as a
sense of artistic life. The precinct of the marbles and bronzes
spoke to him especially to-day; the glazed garden, not florally
rich, with its new productions alternating with perfunctory plants
and its queer, damp smell, partly the odour of plastic clay, of the
studios of sculptors, put forth the voice of old associations, of
other visits, of companionships now ended—an insinuating eloquence
which was at the same time somehow identical with the general sharp
contagion of Paris. There was youth in the air, and a multitudinous
newness, for ever reviving, and the diffusion of a hundred talents,
ingenuities, experiments. The summer clouds made shadows on the
roof of the great building; the white images, hard in their
crudity, spotted the place with provocations; the rattle of plates
at the restaurant sounded sociable in the distance, and our young
man congratulated himself more than ever that he had not missed his
chance. He felt how it would help him to settle something. At the
moment he made this reflexion his eye fell upon a person who
appeared—just in the first glimpse—to carry out the idea of help.
He uttered a lively ejaculation, which, however, in its want of
finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so relevant and
congruous, was the other party to this encounter.

The girl's attention followed her brother's, resting with it on
a young man who faced them without seeing them, engaged as he was
in imparting to two companions his ideas about one of the works
exposed to view. What Biddy remarked was that this young man was
fair and fat and of the middle stature; he had a round face and a
short beard and on his crown a mere reminiscence of hair, as the
fact that he carried his hat in his hand permitted to be observed.
Bridget Dormer, who was quick, placed him immediately as a
gentleman, but as a gentleman unlike any other gentleman she had
ever seen. She would have taken him for very foreign but that the
words proceeding from his mouth reached her ear and imposed
themselves as a rare variety of English. It was not that a
foreigner might not have spoken smoothly enough, nor yet that the
speech of this young man was not smooth. It had in truth a
conspicuous and aggressive perfection, and Biddy was sure no mere
learner would have ventured to play such tricks with the tongue. He
seemed to draw rich effects and wandering airs from it—to modulate
and manipulate it as he would have done a musical instrument. Her
view of the gentleman's companions was less operative, save for her
soon making the reflexion that they were people whom in any
country, from China to Peru, you would immediately have taken for
natives. One of them was an old lady with a shawl; that was the
most salient way in which she presented herself. The shawl was an
ancient much-used fabric of embroidered cashmere, such as many
ladies wore forty years ago in their walks abroad and such as no
lady wears to-day. It had fallen half off the back of the wearer,
but at the moment Biddy permitted herself to consider her she gave
it a violent jerk and brought it up to her shoulders again, where
she continued to arrange and settle it, with a good deal of
jauntiness and elegance, while she listened to the talk of the
gentleman. Biddy guessed that this little transaction took place
very frequently, and was not unaware of its giving the old lady a
droll, factitious, faded appearance, as if she were singularly out
of step with the age. The other person was very much younger—she
might have been a daughter—and had a pale face, a low forehead, and
thick dark hair. What she chiefly had, however, Biddy rapidly
discovered, was a pair of largely-gazing eyes. Our young friend was
helped to the discovery by the accident of their resting at this
moment for a time—it struck Biddy as very long—on her own. Both
these ladies were clad in light, thin, scant gowns, giving an
impression of flowered figures and odd transparencies, and in low
shoes which showed a great deal of stocking and were ornamented
with large rosettes. Biddy's slightly agitated perception travelled
directly to their shoes: they suggested to her vaguely that the
wearers were dancers—connected possibly with the old-fashioned
exhibition of the shawl-dance. By the time she had taken in so much
as this the mellifluous young man had perceived and addressed
himself to her brother. He came on with an offered hand. Nick
greeted him and said it was a happy chance—he was uncommonly glad
to see him.

"I never come across you—I don't know why," Nick added while the
two, smiling, looked each other up and down like men reunited after
a long interval.

"Oh it seems to me there's reason enough: our paths in life are
so different." Nick's friend had a great deal of manner, as was
evinced by his fashion of saluting Biddy without knowing her.

"Different, yes, but not so different as that. Don't we both
live in London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?"

"Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I don't live in the nineteenth
century. Jamais de la vie!" the gentleman declared.

"Nor in London either?"

"Yes—when I'm not at Samarcand! But surely we've diverged since
the old days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While
the stranger spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not
because it was she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his
nature to desire a second auditor—a kind of sympathetic gallery.
Her life was somehow filled with shy people, and she immediately
knew she had never encountered any one who seemed so to know his
part and recognise his cues.

"How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked.

"I know well enough what you used to."

"That's more than I do myself. There were so many things."

"Yes, there are many things—many, many: that's what makes life
so amusing."

"Do you find it amusing?"

"My dear fellow, c'est a se tordre. Don't you think so? Ah it
was high time I should meet you—I see. I've an idea you need
me."

"Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck
his sister and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was
so important as that, he didn't introduce him.

"There are many gods and this is one of their temples," the
mysterious personage went on. "It's a house of strange idols—isn't
it?—and of some strange and unnatural sacrifices."

To Biddy as much as to her brother this remark might have been
offered; but the girl's eyes turned back to the ladies who for the
moment had lost their companion. She felt irresponsive and feared
she should pass with this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared,
English girl, which was not the type she aimed at; but wasn't even
ocular commerce overbold so long as she hadn't a sign from Nick?
The elder of the strange women had turned her back and was looking
at some bronze figure, losing her shawl again as she did so; but
the other stood where their escort had quitted her, giving all her
attention to his sudden sociability with others. Her arms hung at
her sides, her head was bent, her face lowered, so that she had an
odd appearance of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in
this attitude she was striking, though her air was so
unconciliatory as almost to seem dangerous. Did it express
resentment at having been abandoned for another girl? Biddy, who
began to be frightened—there was a moment when the neglected
creature resembled a tigress about to spring—was tempted to cry out
that she had no wish whatever to appropriate the gentleman. Then
she made the discovery that the young lady too had a manner, almost
as much as her clever guide, and the rapid induction that it
perhaps meant no more than his. She only looked at Biddy from
beneath her eyebrows, which were wonderfully arched, but there was
ever so much of a manner in the way she did it. Biddy had a
momentary sense of being a figure in a ballet, a dramatic ballet—a
subordinate motionless figure, to be dashed at to music or
strangely capered up to. It would be a very dramatic ballet indeed
if this young person were the heroine. She had magnificent hair,
the girl reflected; and at the same moment heard Nick say to his
interlocutor: "You're not in London—one can't meet you there?"

"I rove, drift, float," was the answer; "my feelings direct
me—if such a life as mine may be said to have a direction. Where
there's anything to feel I try to be there!" the young man
continued with his confiding laugh.

"I should like to get hold of you," Nick returned.

"Well, in that case there would be no doubt the intellectual
adventure. Those are the currents—any sort of personal
relation—that govern my career."

"I don't want to lose you this time," Nick continued in a tone
that excited Biddy's surprise. A moment before, when his friend had
said that he tried to be where there was anything to feel, she had
wondered how he could endure him.

"Don't lose me, don't lose me!" cried the stranger after a
fashion which affected the girl as the highest expression of
irresponsibility she had ever seen. "After all why should you? Let
us remain together unless I interfere"—and he looked, smiling and
interrogative, at Biddy, who still remained blank, only noting
again that Nick forbore to make them acquainted. This was an
anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so. Still, there could be no
anomaly of Nick's that wouldn't impose itself on his younger
sister.

"Certainly, I keep you," he said, "unless on my side I deprive
those ladies—!"

"Charming women, but it's not an indissoluble union. We meet, we
communicate, we part! They're going—I'm seeing them to the door. I
shall come back." With this Nick's friend rejoined his companions,
who moved away with him, the strange fine eyes of the girl
lingering on Biddy's brother as well as on Biddy herself as they
receded.

"Who is he—who are they?" Biddy instantly asked.

"He's a gentleman," Nick made answer—insufficiently, she
thought, and even with a shade of hesitation. He spoke as if she
might have supposed he was not one, and if he was really one why
didn't he introduce him? But Biddy wouldn't for the world have put
this question, and he now moved to the nearest bench and dropped
upon it as to await the other's return. No sooner, however, had his
sister seated herself than he said: "See here, my dear, do you
think you had better stay?"

"Do you want me to go back to mother?" the girl asked with a
lengthening visage.

"Well, what do you think?" He asked it indeed gaily enough.

"Is your conversation to be about—about private affairs?"

"No, I can't say that. But I doubt if mother would think it the
sort of thing that's 'necessary to your development.'"

This assertion appeared to inspire her with the eagerness with
which she again broke out: "But who are they—who are they?"

"I know nothing of the ladies. I never saw them before. The
man's a fellow I knew very well at Oxford. He was thought immense
fun there. We've diverged, as he says, and I had almost lost sight
of him, but not so much as he thinks, because I've read him—read
him with interest. He has written a very clever book."

"What kind of a book?"

"A sort of novel."

"What sort of novel?"

"Well, I don't know—with a lot of good writing." Biddy listened
to this so receptively that she thought it perverse her brother
should add: "I daresay Peter will have come if you return to
mother."

"I don't care if he has. Peter's nothing to me. But I'll go if
you wish it."

Nick smiled upon her again and then said: "It doesn't signify.
We'll all go."

"All?" she echoed.

"He won't hurt us. On the contrary he'll do us good."

This was possible, the girl reflected in silence, but none the
less the idea struck her as courageous, of their taking the odd
young man back to breakfast with them and with the others,
especially if Peter should be there. If Peter was nothing to her it
was singular she should have attached such importance to this
contingency. The odd young man reappeared, and now that she saw him
without his queer female appendages he seemed personally less
weird. He struck her moreover, as generally a good deal accounted
for by the literary character, especially if it were responsible
for a lot of good writing. As he took his place on the bench Nick
said to him, indicating her, "My sister Bridget," and then
mentioned his name, "Mr. Gabriel Nash."

Though his words belonged to the situation it struck her that
his tone didn't, and this made her answer him more dryly than she
usually spoke. "Oh yes, it's very nice."

"And French art interests you? You find things here that
please?"

"Oh yes, I like some of them."

Mr. Nash considered her kindly. "I hoped you'd say you like the
Academy better."

"She would if she didn't think you expected it," said Nicholas
Dormer.

"Oh Nick!" Biddy protested.

"Miss Dormer's herself an English picture," their visitor
pronounced in the tone of a man whose urbanity was a general
solvent.

"That's a compliment if you don't like them!" Biddy
exclaimed.

"Ah some of them, some of them; there's a certain sort of
thing!" Mr. Nash continued. "We must feel everything, everything
that we can. We're here for that."

"You do like English art then?" Nick demanded with a slight
accent of surprise.

Mr. Nash indulged his wonder. "My dear Dormer, do you remember
the old complaint I used to make of you? You had formulas that were
like walking in one's hat. One may see something in a case and one
may not."

"Upon my word," said Nick, "I don't know any one who was fonder
of a generalisation than you. You turned them off as the man at the
street-corner distributes hand-bills."

"They were my wild oats. I've sown them all."

"We shall see that!"

"Oh there's nothing of them now: a tame, scanty, homely growth.
My only good generalisations are my actions."

"We shall see them then."

"Ah pardon me. You can't see them with the naked eye. Moreover,
mine are principally negative. People's actions, I know, are for
the most part the things they do—but mine are all the things I
don't do. There are so many of those, so many, but they don't
produce any effect. And then all the rest are shades—extremely fine
shades."

"Shades of behaviour?" Nick inquired with an interest which
surprised his sister, Mr. Nash's discourse striking her mainly as
the twaddle of the under-world.

"Shades of impression, of appreciation," said the young man with
his explanatory smile. "All my behaviour consists of my
feelings."

"Well, don't you show your feelings? You used to!"

"Wasn't it mainly those of disgust?" Nash asked. "Those operate
no longer. I've closed that window."

"Do you mean you like everything?"

"Dear me, no! But I look only at what I do like."

"Do you mean that you've lost the noble faculty of disgust?"

"I haven't the least idea. I never try it. My dear fellow," said
Gabriel Nash, "we've only one life that we know anything about:
fancy taking it up with disagreeable impressions! When then shall
we go in for the agreeable?"

"What do you mean by the agreeable?" Nick demanded.

"Oh the happy moments of our consciousness—the multiplication of
those moments. We must save as many as possible from the dark
gulf."

Nick had excited surprise on the part of his sister, but it was
now Biddy's turn to make him open his eyes a little. She raised her
sweet voice in appeal to the stranger.

"Don't you think there are any wrongs in the world—any abuses
and sufferings?"

"Oh so many, so many! That's why one must choose."

"Choose to stop them, to reform them—isn't that the choice?"
Biddy asked. "That's Nick's," she added, blushing and looking at
this personage.

"To me personally the simplest ways are those that appeal most,"
Mr. Nash went on. "We pay too much attention to the ugly; we notice
it, we magnify it. The great thing is to leave it alone and
encourage the beautiful."

"You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said
Nick.

"Ah precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of
appreciation. We must train our special sense. It's capable of
extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that."

"But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is
no affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say?
Where are the fine consequences?" Dormer asked.

"In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence.
That's the most important one we have to do with. I am a fine
consequence," said Gabriel Nash.

Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as
to look at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before,
pausing and turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a
heightened colour, an air of desperation and the question, after a
moment: "Are you then an asthete?"

"Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat!
I've no profession, my dear young lady. I've no état civil. These
things are a part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say,
I keep to the simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do.
Merely to be is such a métier; to live such an art; to feel such a
career!"

Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her
brother said to his old friend: "And to write?"

"To write? Oh I shall never do it again!"

"You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book
of yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and
ingenious."

"Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his
companion exclaimed.

"Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with
it. And why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives
other people of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't
begin to have an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be
of the smallest consequence to you what you may be called. That's
rudimentary."

"But if you go in for shades you must also go in for names. You
must distinguish," Nick objected. "The observer's nothing without
his categories, his types and varieties."

"Ah trust him to distinguish!" said Gabriel Nash sweetly.
"That's for his own convenience; he has, privately, a terminology
to meet it. That's one's style. But from the moment it's for the
convenience of others the signs have to be grosser, the shades
begin to go. That's a deplorable hour! Literature, you see, is for
the convenience of others. It requires the most abject concessions.
It plays such mischief with one's style that really I've had to
give it up."

"And politics?" Nick asked.

"Well, what about them?" was Mr. Nash's reply with a special
cadence as he watched his friend's sister, who was still examining
her statue. Biddy was divided between irritation and curiosity. She
had interposed space, but she had not gone beyond ear-shot. Nick's
question made her curiosity throb as a rejoinder to his friend's
words.

"That, no doubt you'll say, is still far more for the
convenience of others—is still worse for one's style."

Biddy turned round in time to hear Mr. Nash answer: "It has
simply nothing in life to do with shades! I can't say worse for it
than that."

Biddy stepped nearer at this and drew still further on her
courage. "Won't mamma be waiting? Oughtn't we to go to
luncheon?"

Both the young men looked up at her and Mr. Nash broke out: "You
ought to protest! You ought to save him!"

"To save him?" Biddy echoed.

"He had a style, upon my word he had! But I've seen it go. I've
read his speeches."

"You were capable of that?" Nick laughed.

"For you, yes. But it was like listening to a nightingale in a
brass band."

"I think they were beautiful," Biddy declared.

Her brother got up at this tribute, and Mr. Nash, rising too,
said with his bright colloquial air: "But, Miss Dormer, he had
eyes. He was made to see—to see all over, to see everything. There
are so few like that."

"He sees his 'side,' his dreadful 'side,' dear young lady. Poor
man, fancy your having a 'side'—you, you—and spending your days and
your nights looking at it! I'd as soon pass my life looking at an
advertisement on a hoarding."

"You don't see me some day a great statesman?" said Nick.

"My dear fellow, it's exactly what I've a terror of."

"Mercy! don't you admire them?" Biddy cried.

"It's a trade like another and a method of making one's way
which society certainly condones. But when one can be something
better—!"

"Why what in the world is better?" Biddy asked.

The young man gasped and Nick, replying for him, said: "Gabriel
Nash is better! You must come and lunch with us. I must keep you—I
must!" he added.

"We shall save him yet," Mr. Nash kept on easily to Biddy while
they went and the girl wondered still more what her mother would
make of him.

Chapter3

After her companions left her Lady Agnes rested for five minutes
in silence with her elder daughter, at the end of which time she
observed: "I suppose one must have food at any rate," and, getting
up, quitted the place where they had been sitting. "And where are
we to go? I hate eating out of doors," she went on.

"Dear me, when one comes to Paris—!" Grace returned in a tone
apparently implying that in so rash an adventure one must be
prepared for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered
to where they saw a large sign of "Buffet" suspended in the air,
entering a precinct reserved for little white-clothed tables,
straw-covered chairs and long-aproned waiters. One of these
functionaries approached them with eagerness and with a "Mesdames
sont seules?" receiving in return from her ladyship the slightly
snappish announcement "Non; nous sommes beaucoup!" He introduced
them to a table larger than most of the others, and under his
protection they took their places at it and began rather languidly
and vaguely to consider the question of the repast. The waiter had
placed a carte in Lady Agnes's hands and she studied it, through
her eye-glass, with a failure of interest, while he enumerated with
professional fluency the resources of the establishment and Grace
watched the people at the other tables. She was hungry and had
already broken a morsel from a long glazed roll.

"Not cold beef and pickles, you know," she observed to her
mother. Lady Agnes gave no heed to this profane remark, but dropped
her eye-glass and laid down the greasy document. "What does it
signify? I daresay it's all nasty," Grace continued; and she added
inconsequently: "If Peter comes he's sure to be particular."

"Let him first be particular to come!" her ladyship exclaimed,
turning a cold eye upon the waiter.

"Poulet chasseur, filets mignons sauce bearnaise," the man
suggested.

"You'll give us what I tell you," said Lady Agnes; and she
mentioned with distinctness and authority the dishes of which she
desired that the meal should be composed. He interjected three or
four more suggestions, but as they produced absolutely no
impression on her he became silent and submissive, doing justice
apparently to her ideas. For Lady Agnes had ideas, and, though it
had suited her humour ten minutes before to profess herself
helpless in such a case, the manner in which she imposed them on
the waiter as original, practical, and economical, showed the high
executive woman, the mother of children, the daughter of earls, the
consort of an official, the dispenser of hospitality, looking back
upon a lifetime of luncheons. She carried many cares, and the
feeding of multitudes—she was honourably conscious of having fed
them decently, as she had always done everything—had ever been one
of them. "Everything's absurdly dear," she remarked to her daughter
as the waiter went away. To this remark Grace made no answer. She
had been used for a long time back to hearing that everything was
very dear; it was what one always expected. So she found the case
herself, but she was silent and inventive about it, and nothing
further passed, in the way of conversation with her mother, while
they waited for the latter's orders to be executed, till Lady Agnes
reflected audibly: "He makes me unhappy, the way he talks about
Julia."

"Sometimes I think he does it to torment one. One can't mention
her!" Grace responded.

"It's better not to mention her, but to leave it alone."

"Yet he never mentions her of himself."

"In some cases that's supposed to show that people like
people—though of course something more's required to prove it,"
Lady Agnes continued to meditate. "Sometimes I think he's thinking
of her, then at others I can't fancy what he's thinking of."

"It would be awfully suitable," said Grace, biting her roll.

Her companion had a pause, as if looking for some higher ground
to put it upon. Then she appeared to find this loftier level in the
observation: "Of course he must like her—he has known her
always."

"Nothing can be plainer than that she likes him," Grace
opined.

"Poor Julia!" Lady Agnes almost wailed; and her tone suggested
that she knew more about that than she was ready to state.

"It isn't as if she wasn't clever and well read," her daughter
went on. "If there were nothing else there would be a reason in her
being so interested in politics, in everything that he is."

"Ah what Nick is—that's what I sometimes wonder!"

Grace eyed her parent in some despair: "Why, mother, isn't he
going to be like papa?" She waited for an answer that didn't come;
after which she pursued: "I thought you thought him so like him
already."

"Well, I don't," said Lady Agnes quietly.

"Who is then? Certainly Percy isn't."

Lady Agnes was silent a space. "There's no one like your
father."

"Dear papa!" Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid
transition: "It would be so jolly for all of us—she'd be so nice to
us."

"She's that already—in her way," said Lady Agnes
conscientiously, having followed the return, quick as it was. "Much
good does it do her!" And she reproduced the note of her bitterness
of a moment before.

"It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do,
and I think she knows it," Grace declared. "One can at any rate
keep other women off."

"Don't meddle—you're very clumsy," was her mother's not
particularly sympathetic rejoinder. "There are other women who are
beautiful, and there are others who are clever and rich."

"Yes, but not all in one: that's what's so nice in Julia. Her
fortune would be thrown in; he wouldn't appear to have married her
for it."

"If he does he won't," said Lady Agnes a trifle obscurely.

"Yes, that's what's so charming. And he could do anything then,
couldn't he?"

"Things aren't so easy," Lady Agnes judged. "It will all depend
on Nick's behaviour. He can stop it to-morrow."

Grace Dormer stared; she evidently thought Mr. Carteret's
beneficence a part of the scheme of nature. "How could he stop
it?"

"By not being serious. It isn't so hard to prevent people giving
you money."

"Serious?" Grace repeated. "Does he want him to be a prig like
Lord Egbert?"

"Yes—that's exactly what he wants. And what he'll do for him
he'll do for him only if he marries Julia."

"Has he told you?" Grace inquired. And then, before her mother
could answer, "I'm delighted at that!" she cried.

"He hasn't told me, but that's the way things happen." Lady
Agnes was less optimistic than her daughter, and such optimism as
she cultivated was a thin tissue with the sense of things as they
are showing through. "If Nick becomes rich Charles Carteret will
make him more so. If he doesn't he won't give him a shilling."

"Oh mamma!" Grace demurred.

"It's all very well to say that in public life money isn't as
necessary as it used to be," her ladyship went on broodingly.
"Those who say so don't know anything about it. It's always
intensely necessary."

Her daughter, visibly affected by the gloom of her manner, felt
impelled to evoke as a corrective a more cheerful idea. "I daresay;
but there's the fact—isn't there?—that poor papa had so
little."

"Yes, and there's the fact that it killed him!"

These words came out with a strange, quick, little flare of
passion. They startled Grace Dormer, who jumped in her place and
gasped, "Oh mother!" The next instant, however, she added in a
different voice, "Oh Peter!" for, with an air of eagerness, a
gentleman was walking up to them.

"How d'ye do, Cousin Agnes? How d'ye do, little Grace?" Peter
Sherringham laughed and shook hands with them, and three minutes
later was settled in his chair at their table, on which the first
elements of the meal had been placed. Explanations, on one side and
the other, were demanded and produced; from which it appeared that
the two parties had been in some degree at cross-purposes. The day
before Lady Agnes and her companions travelled to Paris Sherringham
had gone to London for forty-eight hours on private business of the
ambassador's, arriving, on his return by the night-train, only
early that morning. There had accordingly been a delay in his
receiving Nick Dormer's two notes. If Nick had come to the embassy
in person—he might have done him the honour to call—he would have
learned that the second secretary was absent. Lady Agnes was not
altogether successful in assigning a motive to her son's neglect of
this courteous form; she could but say: "I expected him, I wanted
him to go; and indeed, not hearing from you, he would have gone
immediately—an hour or two hence, on leaving this place. But we're
here so quietly—not to go out, not to seem to appeal to the
ambassador. Nick put it so—'Oh mother, we'll keep out of it; a
friendly note will do.' I don't know definitely what he wanted to
keep out of, unless anything like gaiety. The embassy isn't gay, I
know. But I'm sure his note was friendly, wasn't it? I daresay
you'll see for yourself. He's different directly he gets abroad; he
doesn't seem to care." Lady Agnes paused a moment, not carrying out
this particular elucidation; then she resumed: "He said you'd have
seen Julia and that you'd understand everything from her. And when
I asked how she'd know he said, 'Oh she knows everything!'"

"He never said a word to me about Julia," Peter Sherringham
returned. Lady Agnes and her daughter exchanged a glance at this:
the latter had already asked three times where Julia was, and her
ladyship dropped that they had been hoping she would be able to
come with Peter. The young man set forth that she was at the moment
at an hotel in the Rue de la Paix, but had only been there since
that morning; he had seen her before proceeding to the Champs
Elysées. She had come up to Paris by an early train— she had been
staying at Versailles, of all places in the world. She had been a
week in Paris on her return from Cannes—her stay there had been of
nearly a month: fancy!—and then had gone out to Versailles to see
Mrs. Billinghurst. Perhaps they'd remember her, poor Dallow's
sister. She was staying there to teach her daughters French—she had
a dozen or two!—and Julia had spent three days with her. She was to
return to England about the twenty-fifth. It would make seven weeks
she must have been away from town—a rare thing for her; she usually
stuck to it so in summer.

"Three days with Mrs. Billinghurst—how very good-natured of
her!" Lady Agnes commented.

"I proposed it, but she wouldn't." Another eye-beam, at this,
passed between the two ladies and Peter went on: "She said you must
come and see her at the Hôtel de Hollande."

"Of course we'll do that," Lady Agnes declared. "Nick went to
ask about her at the Westminster."

"She gave that up; they wouldn't give her the rooms she wanted,
her usual set."

"She's delightfully particular!" Grace said complacently. Then
she added: "She does like pictures, doesn't she?"

Peter Sherringham stared. "Oh I daresay. But that's not what she
has in her head this morning. She has some news from London—she's
immensely excited."

"What has she in her head?" Lady Agnes asked.

"What's her news from London?" Grace added.

"She wants Nick to stand."

"Nick to stand?" both ladies cried.

"She undertakes to bring him in for Harsh. Mr. Pinks is dead—the
fellow, you know, who got the seat at the general election. He
dropped down in London—disease of the heart or something of that
sort. Julia has her telegram, but I see it was in last night's
papers."

"Imagine—Nick never mentioned it!" said Lady Agnes.

"Don't you know, mother?—abroad he only reads foreign
papers."

"Oh I know. I've no patience with him," her ladyship continued.
"Dear Julia!"

"It's a nasty little place, and Pinks had a tight squeeze—107 or
something of that sort; but if it returned a Liberal a year ago
very likely it will do so again. Julia at any rate believes it can
be made to—if the man's Nick—and is ready to take the order to put
him in."

"I'm sure if she can do it she will," Grace pronounced.

"Dear, dear Julia! And Nick can do something for himself," said
the mother of this candidate.

"I've no doubt he can do anything," Peter Sherringham returned
good-naturedly. Then, "Do you mean in expenses?" he inquired.

"Ah I'm afraid he can't do much in expenses, poor dear boy! And
it's dreadful how little we can look to Percy."

Lady Agnes coloured a little. "My dear Peter, do you suppose
there will be the least doubt of their 'having' the son of his
father?"

"Of course it's a great name, Cousin Agnes—a very great
name."

"One of the greatest, simply," Lady Agnes smiled.

"It's the best name in the world!" said Grace more
emphatically.

"All the same it didn't prevent his losing his seat."

"By half-a-dozen votes: it was too odious!" her ladyship
cried.

"I remember—I remember. And in such a case as that why didn't
they immediately put him in somewhere else?"

"How one sees you live abroad, dear Peter! There happens to have
been the most extraordinary lack of openings—I never saw anything
like it—for a year. They've had their hand on him, keeping him all
ready. I daresay they've telegraphed him."

"And he hasn't told you?"

Lady Agnes faltered. "He's so very odd when he's abroad!"

"At home too he lets things go," Grace interposed. "He does so
little—takes no trouble." Her mother suffered this statement to
pass unchallenged, and she pursued philosophically: "I suppose it's
because he knows he's so clever."

"So he is, dear old man. But what does he do, what has he been
doing, in a positive way?"

"He has been painting."

"Ah not seriously!" Lady Agnes protested.

"That's the worst way," said Peter Sherringham. "Good
things?"

Neither of the ladies made a direct response to this, but Lady
Agnes said: "He has spoken repeatedly. They're always calling on
him."

"He speaks magnificently," Grace attested.

"That's another of the things I lose, living in far countries.
And he's doing the Salon now with the great Biddy?"

"Just the things in this part. I can't think what keeps them so
long," Lady Agnes groaned. "Did you ever see such a dreadful
place?"

Sherringham stared. "Aren't the things good? I had an
idea——!"

"Good?" cried Lady Agnes. "They're too odious, too wicked."

"Ah," laughed Peter, "that's what people fall into if they live
abroad. The French oughtn't to live abroad!"

"Here they come," Grace announced at this point; "but they've
got a strange man with them."

"That's a bore when we want to talk!" Lady Agnes sighed.

Peter got up in the spirit of welcome and stood a moment
watching the others approach. "There will be no difficulty in
talking, to judge by the gentleman," he dropped; and while he
remains so conspicuous our eyes may briefly rest on him. He was
middling high and was visibly a representative of the nervous
rather than of the phlegmatic branch of his race. He had an oval
face, fine firm features, and a complexion that tended to the
brown. Brown were his eyes, and women thought them soft; dark brown
his hair, in which the same critics sometimes regretted the absence
of a little undulation. It was perhaps to conceal this plainness
that he wore it very short. His teeth were white, his moustache was
pointed, and so was the small beard that adorned the extremity of
his chin. His face expressed intelligence and was very much alive;
it had the further distinction that it often struck superficial
observers with a certain foreignness of cast. The deeper sort,
however, usually felt it latently English enough. There was an idea
that, having taken up the diplomatic career and gone to live in
strange lands, he cultivated the mask of an alien, an Italian or a
Spaniard; of an alien in time even—one of the wonderful ubiquitous
diplomatic agents of the sixteenth century. In fact, none the less,
it would have been impossible to be more modern than Peter
Sherringham—more of one's class and one's country. But this didn't
prevent several stray persons—Bridget Dormer for instance—from
admiring the hue of his cheek for its olive richness and his
moustache and beard for their resemblance to those of Charles I. At
the same time—she rather jumbled her comparisons—she thought he
recalled a Titian.